


Held in Glass

by unincased



Category: Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 14:10:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18074900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unincased/pseuds/unincased
Summary: Sebastian wants to put a part of himself in a bottle and send it out to sea.





	Held in Glass

Dreams drift up in glass bottles. The sun sifts through hair as Charles and Sebastian kick up the sea. They have already emptied out a bottle between them and are smiling and laughing, turning in circles as their feet redirect the current underneath. Parents seek their wild children, and a little girl chases her friends through the sand as their joy screams.

Sebastian says, “I want something to come by water,” and looks to it, wide-eyed, waiting for something to drift to his feet.

“A treasure map?” Charles suggests. He takes the sea into one cupped hand and loses it to gravity. There's nothing on the horizon but the ripples of waves, the glare of the sun, the hint of an illusion.

“Anything,” Sebastian insists. “Anything but driftwood. Something interesting. Do you think Papa will come to the Carambona with us tonight? I bet he won't. Where did I put Aloysius?”

“On your dresser. But what would you want it for?”

“I just want it. Will you paint anything here?”

Charles catches Sebastian's arm and smiles. He takes the hat from Sebastian's head and puts it on his own. “I will paint something that comes by sea.”

“It's the only way to arrive.” Sebastian takes back his hat, Charles reaches for it, someone pulls and someone pushes and now they are soaked in saltwater and laughing to the sky.

 

Sitting on the seashore, Charles asks, “What's this?”

The frown may be from the glare of the sun, but Sebastian sounds so sad when he says, “It's empty,” as if the thought emptied him of joy. He raises the sea-carried bottle until it is full of sunshine, brings it forward, looks through the opening as if that would show more than the clear glass. He says, “I'll write a letter for it,” and then he is up from those Venetian sands and forward to the crumbling palace his father calls home, and his feet trail sand and water across marble floors.

He says to Charles, “It will be a message to myself, and one day, someone will find it, and a part of myself will be with them, waiting for me to discover it.”

“But how will you find that person?” Charles asks. He watches Sebastian search for paper and ink in the cabinet drawers. Sebastian glances up from his search, hand on wrought-iron handle, surprise opening his lips so he may say:

“I just will.”

Because that is the order of Sebastian's universe: whim and imperative. Things happen because they are beautiful. Hope works because it wants it to. Summer lasts for ever, and bottles carry people across the seas.

 

But what do you say to someone you have yet not met? What part of yourself do you want to keep? They are sitting at a glass table, two glasses between them, the sea that promises strangers lain out like fabric before them, waiting, waiting. Sebastian balls up a scrap of parchment and throws it at the ocean, but it lands in the sand and is pulled away by the breeze.

“This is stupid,” says Sebastian, and he pushes away their mismatched stack of papers. His wine turns amber as the sunlight filters through it and liquid slips down from the edge to his mouth. “It's a childish idea. I hate it.” He buries his feet in the sand and for a moment wants the bottle to break, to vanish, to have sunk into the sea and never reached him at all.

Charles's hand stills Sebastian's arm. “Sebastian. Think of what you really want to say.”

“I want to say that messages in bottles are stupid.”

“That is going to be a very cross bit of yourself you'll be finding in twenty years. Give it here.”

Charles takes up the heavy ink pen, tugs away at a jagged piece of paper. Sebastian watches the quick movements of Charles's hand, the slow progress of Charles's arm, as he pulls his pen across the page and forms markings on its paper.

Sebastian takes in more of his wine. He glances back at Charles, then drinks again, then speaks. “What have you written?”

And with his shy, proud smile, Charles holds the paper up for Sebastian to see.

“Anything to add?” Charles asks.

Sebastian feels he is happy so he forgets that he is anger, and he answers with the tapping of his feet, “As a matter of fact, I think there is.”

So Sebastian adds it. Then they curl up the paper, bind it with twine, and slip it into the bottle. Together, they walk to the edge of the sea.

“I'll throw it,” Sebastian says, and he brings back his arms and watches the arc, the splash, the sinking and the floating and then the carrying away.

_To Whomever Finds This,_

__

__

_I have dreamed nothing more beautiful than Venice in summer at the sea. Venice with wine, Venice with a friend, Venice serenading in an Italian breeze . . ._

 

And Charles thinks he has never been sadder than when he found that bottle washed up on the shore. It's a little bit like waking up from a dream.

He is alone (Sebastian is playing tennis with his father and Cara is resting and Charles is painting by the sea) and he looks around, just in case. Sebastian isn't here. Sebastian must not see this. Charles lifts the bottle up, turns it in his fingers, sees the still-preserved message they wanted to send out into the world.

Perhaps it's the tide. If he threw it again, would it just come back?

Would it come back when Sebastian could see?

There's an easel up the shore where he has been painting the water, finishing the final touches of that bottle gone off to sea.

Sebastian can't know what happened.

The sand feels coarser on his hands than he remembered it being.

And because Charles is nineteen, in love with beauty, distrustful of the sentiment that truth is beauty's form, he makes a decision to preserve an idea instead of a reality.

You could look at it, he thinks, as the sinking of their message. You could look at it as the burial at sea of Sebastian's dream.

Or you could think of it like this: under the water, far away from summer sun, there is a message in a bottle. It is a piece of them, living forever on the floor of the sea. In the darkness there, they have given their summer immortality.

Charles finishes his work just before sunset, goes inside, the canvas wrapped in cloth and tucked under his arm. It is marble and windows filtering in darkness through the glass. And there in tennis whites is Sebastian, his smile singing of sunlight and eternity. 

“Charles!” Sebastian exclaims, and he's there in front of Charles, embracing him. “How did you spend your day without me? It must have been frightfully boring. You must tell me everything you did.”

Charles holds out the canvas and pulls back the cloth. There's a bottle in the water with a message for the future. Sebastian takes it in hand and runs his fingers over the surface. “Look,” Charles says. “I've made a painting for you.”


End file.
